Pyotr Stolypin

Pyotr Stolypin (14 April 1862-18 September 1911) was Prime Minister of Russia from 21 July 1906 to 18 September 1911, succeeding Ivan Goremykin and preceding Vladimir Kokovtsov.

Biography
Pyotr Stolypin was born in Dresden, Saxony in 1862, the son of a Russian envoy. He went on to join the Russian bureaucracy and worked in the Ministry of Interior from 1884. In 1903, he beceame governor of the Saratov Governorate, where he commended himself through his repression of the local peasant uprisings in the Russian Revolution of 1905. He was called back to Moscow and became Prime Minister. The outstanding statesman of the last decade of the Tsarist era, he quelled the revolution and re-established government control in the cities as well as the countryside. In a further, deeply controversial move, he changed the electoral laws to produce a more conservative and docile State Duma in 1907. At the same time, his land reforms after 1906 undermined peasant communal land tenure through both the transfer of title into individual ownership and the consolidation of landholdings, thus creating the foundation of greater agricultural efficiency. He was assassinated at the Kiev Opera House by the anarchist revolutionary Dmitry Bogrov.